Overview
Professor Thomas Jungbauer is an Assistant Professor of Strategy & Business Economics at the Johnson Graduate School of Management. He applies economic theory to study welfare implications of allocation mechanisms like auctions or platforms in two-sided economies with prices. In addition, he is interested in the strategic effects of lying and misrepresentation in these markets. While his research primarily focuses on high-skill labor markets, his analyses extend to questions of industrial organization and entrepreneurship.
In his work, Professor Jungbauer shows that wage competition in high-skill labor markets may result in an inefficient allocation of workers if firms hiring quotas are sufficiently different. He also establishes that firms may opt to delegate their bidding for different vacant positions to agents within or outside the firm as they navigate the optimal trade-off between commitment and market power. Currently, he analyzes how strategic misrepresentation such as resume padding or odometer fraud affects market outcomes.
While his work in market design first and foremost concerns specialist labor markets, he is similarly interested in other bilateral coordination problems with and without prices. One of his projects, for instance, deals with the importance of referrals for the reputation of specialists and the resulting appeal for organizations in markets in which matching is important.
In another line of research, he analyzes the optimal branding strategy of firms that sell vertically differentiated product lines. Professor Jungbauer shows that consumers’ brand sensitivity affects the optimal firm policy in a non-monotonic way. Moreover, his work offers an explanation why we see firms implement different branding approaches successfully in one and the same market.
His previous work in economic theory critically reviews the literature of games under fundamental uncertainty and suggests an alternative benchmark approach mirroring the concept of rationalizable strategies under risk.
Professor Jungbauer teaches the Business Strategy core module at the Johnson Graduate School of Management at Cornell University in the 2-year MBA program as well as the MBA/FMBA Cornell-Tsinghua dual-degree program. He has also taught in the accelerated 1-year MBA program and the NYC Tech MBA. During his graduate studies at the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University he taught sessions for various classes in Economics, Statistics, and Strategy at the undergraduate, graduate, MBA, and executive level.
He received his PhD in Managerial Economics and Strategy from the Kellogg School of Management at Northwestern University in 2016. He also holds Master's degrees in Managerial Economics from Northwestern University and in Economics from the Vienna Institute of Advanced Studies (IHS).
